Welcome to Lines, Dots, and Doodles. This is the place for students, parents, and teachers to find out what has been going on in my art class. I have included pictures of my student's artwork and basic explanations of the projects. I hope when you leave this blog, you feel inspired to create. Feel free to browse this blog and borrow any of my art lessons.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

I recently did this lesson with my third graders. We began this lesson by listening to Jazz music. I asked my students to try to visualize the music while it was playing. We then discussed ways to show rhythm and movement in art.

For this lesson, I taught my students to draw a guitar. After this, students were asked to draw designs or patterns to show rhythm. We then used warm and cool colors to paint our pictures. These turned out really nice. I can almost hear the music now.

Monday, January 30, 2012

I found this great lesson on Deep Space Sparkle, however I have seen similar lessons posted on many other sites. Birch trees are great because they are simple. To begin this lesson, we drew a horizon line and painted the sky with watercolors. Then on a different piece of paper, we drew several trees. On half of the tree we painted a gray shadow. We then use black paint to draw small lines on the tree. After this, we cut the trees out, and glued it to our painting. We then used gray watercolor to paint a shadow in the snow. Lastly we added falling snow by splattering white paint.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

When I heard that my fifth graders were learning about the Vikings in Social Studies, I thought it would be a great time to do a Viking ship lesson. These Viking ships were done on tooling foil. After creating the design on the foil, we added a bit of black ink, which we gently wiped off with a paper towel. This made our drawings look antique. Finally, we glued these to a black piece of paper and painted designs in the border with metallic paint. I think these turned out nice.

Monday, January 23, 2012

The problem with teaching art is that I spend all of my time planning and creating artwork for kids, but have little time to focus on my art. This weekend I decided to spend all of Sunday working on a painting. Here is the painting I created.It felt really nice to spend an entire day painting something for myself.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Amazingly enough, this was my first time doing a tessellation lesson. I am not very good at math, and I find tessellations extremely difficult. However, I decided that this year I was going to challenge myself to teach it. To begin this lesson we look at the artwork of MC Escher. My students are always amazed with his work.To make tessellations a bit easier on myself and my students, I had them create a stencil. I gave each child a small rectangular piece of paper with a grid on it. I had my student draw one shape along the side and one shape along the bottom. These shapes were then cut out, and placed on the opposite side. If you use the grid, it is much easier to make sure the shape is placed exactly opposite. Once this is in place, use a piece of tape and secure it. After the stencil is made, I had my students trace it onto their paper. Students then draw details such as eyes, scales, hair, etc. Students then outline everything with a black crayon. After this, all they need to do is color their tessellations. I had my students use liquid watercolors for this part. These turned out great, and it really wasn't hard to do. Tessellations were not as difficult as I thought they would be.

About Me

I am an elementary art teacher in Maryland.
I truly believe I have the best job in the world because I spend every day teaching and creating art. Some of these lessons are mine, but some are borrowed from other blogs or websites. I get ideas from everywhere.